Dwelle says there's increased heart attack risk for someone who smokes marijuana, and the smoke itself has cancer-causing elements. Yet marijuana has never been linked to a single case of cancer.

And what about those FDA-approved drugs? Based on the figures presented by the FDA, at least 30 million people have suffered serious injury or death as a result of taking FDA-approved drugs just since 1998 when the first cited study was published. If you go back several more decades, it is clear that potentially hundreds of millions of people have been directly harmed by the FDA's "negligent homicide."

So if the FDA approved medical marijuana tomorrow, what would that mean? It would certainly be more acceptable nationwide, but would it mean it’s safe? Of course not. We know marijuana is safe from thousands of studies and thousands of years of use.

Much of Mr. Dwelle’s thoughts on marijuana obviously come from what he was taught growing up, and in the schools he attended, which is sad. So much is known now about cannabis and how it reacts with the body, and the fact that North Dakota’s top health official is unaware of these things is scary to say the least.

It was once thought that smoking marijuana caused lung cancer and killed brain cells, but those things have been disproven. In fact, many studies show just the opposite in both cases, that marijuana can shrink cancer cells and encourage brain cell growth.

Education is vital when it comes to medical marijuana, especially among officials in power.